Faceted Navigation & How It Impacts SEO

Have you ever been on an e-commerce store’s website and used the filters on the left-hand side or the top of the page to find the perfect product?

You’ve just encountered faceted navigation in the wild!

While faceted navigation is great for helping your customers find products, implementing it incorrectly can harm your SEO.

In this article, I’ll explain how faceted navigation works, how to use it correctly, and how to reap the benefits.

Key Takeaways

• Faceted navigation lets users find products based on particular attributes (or “facets”).
• Faceted navigation makes it easier for visitors to find what they need and exposes them to a wider range of products.
• You need to implement faceted navigation correctly, otherwise it can cause issues including duplicate pages, reduced link equity, or wasted crawl budget.
• Using noindex tags, choosing your facets strategically, and implementing canonical tags can help your faceted navigation SEO.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• What Is Faceted Navigation?
• How Faceted Navigation Works
• Benefits of Faceted Navigation
  • It Saves Time
  • It Increases Conversions
  • It Makes Large Websites Easier to Navigate
  • It Supports SEO
• Problems Caused By Faceted Navigation
  • Duplicate Content
  • Reduced Link Equity
  • Wasted Crawl Budget
• Faceted Navigation Best Practices
• FAQs
• Conclusion

What Is Faceted Navigation?

Faceted navigation (or faceted search) is a way to refine your search results based on specific characteristics, or “facets”.

Let’s say you’re looking for a birthday present for a friend on Etsy. While you could carry out a search and painstakingly look at all the product pages that appear, you can use faceted navigation to filter the results even further. 

This saves time and means you’re more likely to find a gift your friend will love in less time.

Etsy lets you filter using a wide range of facets, including color, price, occasion, estimated delivery date, even by whether or not free delivery is available.

While filters are always present regardless of what a site visitor searches for, faceted navigation changes depending on the search query and the products on offer.

Let’s say you search Amazon for “jeans”. With faceted navigation, you’d see a list of brands including “Levi’s”, “Wranglers”, and “Tommy Hilfiger”. You wouldn’t see this list if you searched for something unrelated, like “dinner plates”.

While you are most likely to see faceted navigation on e-commerce stores, they also make it easier to find information on other types of websites too. For example, real estate websites or job sites.

How Faceted Navigation Works

It can be easy to implement faceted navigation if you have a simple e-commerce site or you’re using an established CMS. Most platforms have extensions you can download to apply faceted search, like the example below in WooCommerce. If you have a complex website or a custom CMS, a web developer will need to add the functionality for you using code.

To apply faceted navigation to your site, start by adding relevant facets to your products through your web platform interface. In most ecommerce platforms, your facets  will automatically appear on the product search page as well as in your product database. Again, if you have a complex site or are using a custom CMS, you may need a web developer to help you apply the faceted navigation.

When a user selects filters, the URL dynamically updates with parameters. Your website uses these parameters to understand what filters the website visitor is using and retrieve the products from the database that fulfill the specified criteria.

You can use these parameters to identify the most popular user searches in Google Analytics. It also gives the user a specific URL they can use to revisit their search later.

Benefits of Faceted Navigation

Here are some reasons why you should use faceted navigation on your e-commerce website.

It Saves Time

People want a fast and efficient e-commerce experience. The average time spent on a page is only 52 seconds, so you don’t have long to make a good impression! 

Faceted navigation means visitors can find what they need sooner, meaning happier shoppers and a better customer experience.

It Increases Conversions

Faceted navigation makes it easier for users to convert on your site, as it’s easier to find the products that best suit their needs. 

Not only this, but as you’re exposing users to a wider range of products, they’re highly likely to buy more, increasing average order value (AOV).

It Makes Large Websites Easier to Navigate

More products for sale isn’t always a good thing. Psychological studies show that more options can lead to customers struggling to make a decision.

Not only this, but a poorly structured website can confuse visitors, meaning they’re more likely to leave.

Faceted navigation streamlines your e-commerce website, signposting customers directly to the products they want.

In addition to making your website easier to navigate, faceted navigation makes it easier to scale up.  Faceted navigation can help your site scale as you grow, supporting new product categories and markets with an organized filtering structure.

It Supports SEO

Faceted navigation is great for SEO when done right. It creates highly targeted, niche pages designed for customers who are ready to buy and makes it easier for search engines to access your content.

Let’s take the search “cheap pink sunglasses with chain strap.” The first organic result is a link to Etsy’s product page, generated by a faceted navigation search.

Faceted navigation can also help develop a strong internal linking network, helping the search engines understand the relationship between different pages on your site.

Problems Caused By Faceted Navigation

While faceted navigation has many advantages, it can cause serious issues if implemented incorrectly. 

Here are some of the potential issues faceted navigation can cause.

Duplicate Content

Some pages created through faceted navigation will be very similar to each other. This can cause search engines to flag these pages as having duplicate content.

While duplicate content isn’t always harmful, it can confuse the search engines. As a result, the search engines will try to guess which page to prioritize, and there is a chance they’ll choose the less relevant one.

You can use tools like Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and Semrush to identify duplicate pages across your website. 

If you identify any duplicate pages, the solution is to use canonicalization. This is when you use HTML tags to tell the search engines which page is the preferred version and the one it should index in the search engine results. This helps prevent duplicate issues while also consolidating SEO value to one main page. 

Reduced Link Equity

Link equity, or “link juice”, is the authority a page passes to the pages it links to. 

If you have a high-value page on your website that contains internal links, the high-value page passes some of its equity to these links, giving them a small SEO boost.

Source: Creometric

Faceted navigation creates many internal links, often splitting link equity across multiple pages, which can dilute the benefits.

You can reduce the risk of this happening by being savvy with the facet categories you choose. Choose the most valuable facets for your customers to reduce excessive internal links and better concentrate link equity on priority pages. 

Wasted Crawl Budget

Search engines allocate a set amount of time and resources for crawling each website known as “crawl budget.” The budget depends on several factors like the website’s size, update frequency and overall authority. 

Faceted navigation leads to the creation of multiple pages, which can eat into your crawl budget and mean the pages you want the search engines to index don’t get crawled. While smaller sites generally don’t need to worry about crawl budget, websites with over a million unique pages or more than 10,000 pages that change frequenty may face crawl budget issues. Bear in mind, utilizing several factets can create more pages on your site, further increasing demand on your crawl budget. 

The easiest way to identify crawl issues is through Google Search Console. The page indexing report will show you which pages on your site aren’t being indexed.

If there are pages you don’t want indexed, for example, a login portal or password-protected page, you can add a noindex tag. This tells the search engines not to index it, freeing up your crawl budget for other pages.

Faceted Navigation Best Practices

We’ve already looked at some ways you can avoid SEO issues and take advantage of all the benefits of faceted navigation. Here are some additional tips to help you improve the user experience and rank in the search engines.

• You can add directives to your robots.txt file. This tells search engine crawlers to avoid certain pages and is ideal if you want to block multiple faceted pages or pages using specific parameters that don’t need to be crawled or indexed.
• Showing the number of results for each facet can save site users from wasting their time. Google also recommends graying out filtering options if there are zero results. 
• Make sure your faceted navigation is optimized for both desktop and smart devices – for example, you can use collapsible menus to hide certain facets on smaller screens until they’re needed. 
• Organize your facet values logically. For example, alphabetize your brand facets.
• Use AJAX where possible to manage your faceted navigation. AJAX is a web technology which loads results without reloading the page, leading to a better user experience and improved page performance.

FAQs

What is faceted navigation?

Faceted navigation (or faceted search) helps site visitors narrow down their search results by applying additional search filters.

How does faceted navigation impact SEO?

Faceted navigation helps SEO as it creates targeted, long-tail pages that appeal to prospective customers in the search results.

However, when done incorrectly, faceted navigation can hinder SEO as it causes duplicate pages, dilutes link equity, and consuming crawl budget.

What is the difference between faceted navigation and filters?

Faceted navigation allows users to refine results based on specific attributes within a category, such as the brand, fit, or color. Filters represent more broader categories. They are predefined and always present, regardless of the search context.

Examples of filters include “t-shirts”, “dresses”, and “pants”, while examples of faceted navigation include “Levi’s”, “slim fit”, and “blue”.

Conclusion

Faceted navigation can improve your e-commerce SEO and make it easier for customers to find what they need.

However, it’s vital to get it right, or you could do more harm than good to your website’s search engine presence.

While you might be tempted to make everything searchable, the best way to implement faceted navigation is to use it sparingly. Look at what your customers are searching for and introduce the facet categories that will help them the most.

This reduces the risk of SEO errors, all while keeping your site visitors satisfied.